“Convergence has been a persistent theme at Interop for several years, yet it’s typically been applied to data center infrastructure. With the ISR 4451-X branch office router platform, Cisco is … transforming a product line that began as a way to connect remote sites to corporate networks and the Internet into a small-scale data center in a box…a very small, 2U box. … The product’s innovative hardware design splits the control and data planes between two multi-core CPUs. … The 4451-X is poised to address the gap between networking functions that are fully virtualized and those that are still embedded in dedicated networking devices. While edge devices with varying degrees of virtualization have preceded it, Cisco has exploited its UCS expertise to meld the traditional networking features of its branch platform with a general-purpose compute engine, opening the door to levels of integration that allow a blurring of where computing ends and networking begins. As organizations transition to greater virtualization of applications and network services, as embodied by NFV, the 4451-X will facilitate the shift and could serve as a model for future converged hardware designs.”

Gone are yesterday’s silo architectures and IT sprawl. For resource and budget constrained IT teams, the old model simply will not scale to today’s business requirements. To ensure a high quality user experience in today’s distributed networks, IT will need to deploy advanced WAN services in order to fully see what applications are moving through their network, control traffic at a granular level, off-load the WAN with a variety of approaches and secure all traffic from any device to any cloud over any transport.

With Cisco ISR 4451-X, rather than dedicating a set of resources to a particular service function, application, or line of business, this new converged infrastructure creates a pool of virtualized server, storage and networking capacity that is shared by multiple applications and lines of business.

This is especially useful as the Internet of Things emerges, and organizations move to Fog Computing, where large amounts of data will be collected and analyzed right at the branch site. Having a platform that can scale to data center class compute power into a compact branch platform will be essential. Customers can get ready now, with the Cisco ISR 4451-X.

For those of you who want to learn more about the most innovative branch router and how it can transform your business, you can read the solution overview or watch a brief video from Matt Bolick, one of our lead senior technical marketing engineers who worked closely with the engineers who brought the revolutionary architecture of the Cisco ISR 4451-X to life.

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Hi Sunu -
Thank you for your interest. The ISR's have always been a highly reliable platform, and the 4451-X takes this up one more level.
The 4451-X supports a variety of built-in capabilities for fault tolerance as well as network high availability options. The 4451-X supports redundant power supplies as well as redundant cooling fans and storage all of which are hot-swappable. Power feeds, drives and moving fans are the most common failure points in any network device so building in redundancy goes a long way to improve network up time. For even greater resilience, the 4451-X supports standards-based network high-availability with features such as HSRP and VRRP.
From a module point-of-view, the built in server capability of the UCS E-Series supports additional redundancy in the form of RAID storage and hypervisor failover between modules. And, the Smartnet on the ISR covers the UCS E-Series server and hard disks at no additional cost.
Also, the new "service container" architecture allows IT admins to dedicate a set of resources for running each WAN service. This ensures that you can run multiple services like VPN, firewall, QoS, WAN opt, and more without one service impacting another or the overall router performance. This is one of the reasons this platform maintains a steady performance curve, even when additional services are added.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Raakhee

Hello Tune,
Cisco Integrated Services Router is a multiservice platform, that provides security, application optimization, unified communications, WLAN controller, application hosting services to name a few. We do have VPN connectivity services (DMVPN,EasyVPN,GETVPN), and threat defense solutions (Zone Based Firewall, URL Filtering, etc.). We can also host applications on our Cisco UCS E-Series Server Module that plugs into the ISR. This module supports several different hypervisors, including Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and Citrix XenServer
This award recognizes our latest architectural advancements that makes each of these servers run just as well on a single box, as they would on separate appliances -- enabling services without compromises. And, bringing advanced network, compute and storage makes this ideal for branches as we move into the era of big data, and more processing will be needed at the branch.
Let us know if you have further questions.

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